


expressions

by buckgaybarnes



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Awkward Romance, Caretaking, Getting Together, Kissing, M/M, disasters in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 04:53:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20522249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckgaybarnes/pseuds/buckgaybarnes
Summary: "I could bloody kiss you," Hermann says.(OR: Hermann uses an interesting new phrase; Newt obsesses.)





	expressions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rednights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednights/gifts).

> here's a little bday drabble for a friend that's horribly belated, as per her plot request :) HOPE U ENJOY IT REBECCA I LOVE U.....

Newt’s of the scientific opinion that Hermann needs to learn how to _ take it easy_. It’s not healthy for him to be up as late as he is, to work himself as much as he does, and Newt knows it’s hypocritical, okay, nine times out of ten he’s pushing three in the morning and guzzling Monster drinks right alongside Hermann, but Hermann is—Hermann. Perpetual stick up his ass, chip on his shoulder Hermann. Newt knows how to take it easy when he wants to. Newt’s skilled in taking it easy. He can shut it off just fine.

Hermann can’t. It’s what leads them to situations like this: Hermann, hunched over his chalkboard, pale-faced and sweating and clearly some sort of sick, batting Newt away (and throwing stubs of _ chalk _at him) each time Newt so much as takes a step towards him. Not fine, but insisting he is anyway.

“A nap,” Newt begs. He pulls on the hem of Hermann’s sweater. “_Ten minutes_. That’s all. Come on, Hermann.”

Hermann throws more chalk at him; Newt dodges it, and it snaps in two on the ground. “I have work to do,” Hermann says. “I—”

He sways unsteadily on his feet, but catches himself on the chalkboard ledge just in time, eyes screwed up, teeth gritted, glasses slipping off and bouncing at his chest. “Dude,” Newt says.

“I have a slight headache, is all,” Hermann says. He takes a deep breath and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Kindly—kindly let me alone.”

Newt doesn’t. After a little more tugging, and a lot more nagging, he manages to convince Hermann to strip out of a few layers and ease himself down onto the lab couch. (“Ten minutes,” Hermann finally declares.) He’s not feverish, as Newt expected (a quick brush of his hand against Hermann’s forehead confirms), but he is a little clammy to the touch, and he groans as he straightens out his leg. Stiff, too, Newt expects. And, if the way Hermann drifts off almost the instant his head hits the cushion means anything, _ over-exhausted_. The nap will do him good.

Newt plops down cross-legged onto the floor, next to Hermann’s head, and he smooths a few errant strands of hair back from his forehead. Hermann’s face gives a little twitch. Laying here like this, and, more importantly, not _ shouting _at Newt, Hermann almost looks sweet. “Aw, Hermann,” Newt murmurs, with a small pat to his cheek. “You gotta sleep more, man.”

The nap lasts a lot longer than ten minutes. Newt sees to that. Newt sees to a lot of things, actually; he sees that Hermann’s sweater is folded neatly, so it doesn’t get wrinkled and make Hermann bitch, that there’s a new pot of coffee brewing, that Hermann’s pain meds are set out (just in case, because Newt has a feeling he forgot to take them that morning) on his desk, ibuprofen, too, that the messy, smudged equations penned in Hermann’s notebook are copied over to the chalkboard. It’s kinda funny, the way Hermann works—notebook, chalkboard, back to notebook. It seems unnecessarily convoluted. It’s also very endearing. And, you know, now that Newt’s here, with all of Hermann’s work spread out in front of him and a decent knowledge of How to Do Math, and with a few good years of watching Hermann do this very specific type of math on his side, he may as _ well _get started on it for the guy.

Three hours later, as Newt scribbles away happily at Hermann’s chalkboard, there’s a small, confused grunt from the lab couch, the sound of throw pillows plodding to the ground. Hermann is awake. “Hey,” Newt calls over his shoulder. “Good afternoon, sleepy head.”

“Don’t call me _ sleepy head_,” Hermann calls back, voice thick with sleep. “It’s—infantilizing.” He groans, and Newt glances back to see him massaging at his temple with two fingers. He’s a disheveled mess, and his shirt’s ridden up. Newt catches a flash of thin, too-pale stomach and swallows hard. “Hell. How long was I…?”

“Few hours,” Newt says.

Hermann squints. “What are you doing?”

“Well,” Newt says, lifting his hand so it doesn't obscure his writing, “it was a slow work day for me, you know, no new samples or anything, and I thought it might be—” He shrugs. “—_ useful, _ if I picked up some slack for you. You needed the rest.” He turns back to the board and finishes off the solution to one of Hermann’s equations. “There’s coffee on the counter. I set your meds out too. And Advil. No need to thank me.”

Another groan, but happier, this time. Not just happy; euphoric. It has Newt ducking his eyes to the floor and almost blushing. “I could bloody _ kiss _ you,” Hermann says.

Newt falls off the ladder.

He does it quietly enough that Hermann doesn’t notice, but he still falls: he slips on a rung, loses his footing, pinwheels his arms about, and, one hand flinging out to catch himself on another rung just in time, plods to the ground as quietly as the throw pillows had. Newt thinks it’s a pretty justified response to Hermann saying he wants to _ kiss him_. “You what?” Newt squeaks.

But Hermann, busy swallowing down three Advil with a cup of coffee and making even more interesting groaning sounds, doesn’t hear him, or see him land flat on his ass. If he does, he doesn’t care. “You what?” Newt says, louder.

“Mm?” Hermann says around the rim of the mug. He squints at Newt in mild confusion, like he can’t figure out how Newt got from point a (the ladder) to point b (his ass, on the floor) that fast.

“Oh,” Newt says. “That’s what I thought you said.”

Newt lays awake in bed and thinks about it all night long. It’s just an expression, he knows, the sort of thing you just _ say _ when you’re really, really pleased with someone. No different than if Hermann had clapped him on the shoulder and said _ job well done, Newton, thanks a bunch. _ No different than the occasions in which Newt—albeit sarcastically—has said _ I love you, man _ when Hermann sneaks him an extra muffin at dinner, and Hermann scoffs and rolls his eyes.

Except Hermann didn’t clap Newt on the shoulder; he didn’t give a sarcastic _ I love you_, and Newt didn’t roll his eyes. Hermann said he wanted to kiss Newt, and Newt fell off a ladder.

Newt rolls over and presses his face to his pillow. What would kissing Hermann be like? He’s got those funny wide lips, always chapped, like a frog who’s never heard of lip balm, always curved down into a frown. Usually one directed at Newt. Would he frown through a kiss from Newt, too? He might if Newt did it at work—how unprofessional of Newt, Hermann would say, he’s tracking kaiju gunk everywhere, Hermann was doing very important things and now he’s distracted. Other scenarios? At the end of a date, maybe, after Newt walked him home; during their lunch breaks, when they cram themselves together on the lab couch; when they’re up on the roof of the Shatterdome at night, as they sometimes are, watching the sea and the stars. Newt could just sidle over and lay one on him, and Hermann would touch his face, stroke his hair, say something like oh, Newton, I could kiss you forever.

God, that’s corny. Newt’s blushing anyway. Hermann’s really done a _number_ on him.

The next day in the lab carries a tense air. From Newt’s end, anyway. Hermann is as grouchy and grumbly as always and probably doesn’t notice even the smallest change in Newt’s behavior—probably doesn’t catch the way Newt skirts around him, pink-faced, the way he gazes at Hermann across the room, gazes at his _ lips _…

“I really haven’t thanked you enough,” Hermann suddenly says.

Newt fumbles his bit of kaiju intestine. Hermann is standing in front of him, twisting the end of his sweater between two fingers and giving Newt a small smile. Newt didn’t notice him walk over. Too distracted by his own thoughts.

“Oh?” Newt says, dumbly.

“For yesterday,” Hermann says. “I was in a rotten mood and you helped me out a great deal. I imagine I would’ve been up all night agonizing over it all and fretting if you hadn’t.”

“Fretting,” Newt echoes. “Right. Ha. No worries.”

Hermann thrusts a small styrofoam box out at him. Newt furrows his eyebrows. “Dumplings,” Hermann says, and colors. “I went out at lunch. They’re for you—from the, ah, restaurant you like—it’s a thank you.”

The first thing Newt thinks to do is say _ sick, sweet_, or something along those lines, and grab the whole box and start shoving them down his throat. He’s halfway there, too—hand extended, mouth tugging into a grin—but he stops himself. Here is a chance to get even; here is a chance to see what, exactly, the _ fuck _ Hermann was playing at the other day. Newt takes the dumplings, calmly, pops the lid, calmly, takes a moment to observe them (steaming and three times as good as _ anything _ he thinks the mess hall could come up with), and says to Hermann, calmly, “Dude, I could _ kiss _you right now.”

Hermann’s mouth twitches up a single centimeter higher—_ not _what Newt had been expecting. It’s not necessarily unwelcome. (Even if Newt almost does drop the container on the floor from shock.) Hermann’s got a cute smile, and he rarely allows Newt the express pleasure of seeing it. “I’m glad you’re pleased with them,” Hermann says, then nods and clacks back over to his half of the lab. 

So, no reaction there. Newt can work with this.

He tells Hermann he could kiss him three more times that day, each attempt a little more pathetic than the last, a little more desperate: when Hermann brings him coffee, when Hermann opens a door for him, when Hermann tells him his shoelace is untied. Predictably, Hermann doesn’t react to any of it; the first time, he flashes Newt another smile, the second, he looks at Newt quizzically, the last, he _ frowns_, like he can’t understand what Newt’s playing at. (Buddy, Newt thinks, _ buddy_, you and me both.)

“I have a semi-important question,” Newt finally announces over dinner—lukewarm, courtesy of Newt’s excursion out of the lab and to the mess hall while Hermann finished up his work, shared on the lab couch from a single tray balanced on a knee each.

“Only semi-important?” Hermann echoes thickly through his mouthful of food. Hypocrite—he’s always snapping at Newt for never remembering to swallow before he speaks.

“Yesterday,” Newt says, “you said—after you woke up—” He blushes. “You said you could kiss me.”

“Oh,” Hermann says.

“And I’m just wondering,” Newt says, “if you meant it.”

Hermann squints at him, quizzically, and a little nervously. “Is that why you’ve been acting so odd all day?” he says. “I ought to have known something was up. Usually you shout at me and fuss up a storm when I tell you your shoelaces are untied.”

“_Dude_,” Newt says. “Fuck my shoelaces. Do you want to kiss me or not?”

This shuts Hermann up: he ducks his head, fixes his eyes on the floor, goes redder than Newt. He wets his wide lower lip. “It was an expression,” he says, and Newt’s heart sinks, just a fraction. “I didn’t—I was half asleep. I'd almost forgotten I even said it. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“You didn’t,” Newt says.

“Of _ course _not,” Hermann says, then, again, like he's trying to convince himself, “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Of course not,” Newt echoes. “I didn’t either. I just wanted to know if you did.”

Hermann fidgets. Newt fidgets.

Newt places his hand over Hermann’s, which he’s clenched around his knee. When Hermann doesn't push him off, he slides his other hand up to cup Hermann’s jaw—smooth, unlike Newt’s. Newt doesn’t think Hermann’s ever had to shave in his life. “I kinda meant it,” Newt admits. 

“Well,” Hermann says. He angles his body towards Newt's. “In that case. Should we...?”

It takes them a few tries to get the kiss right, they're so nervous; the first time, their noses bump together, the second, their glasses do, the third, Newt misses Hermann's mouth entirely and hits his cheek. Finally Hermann just grabs him by the lapels and _lays one _on him. “Awesome,” Newt laughs, breathlessly.

Hermann looks a little dazed. “Yes,” he agrees. 

**Author's Note:**

> and again SORRY ITS SO LATE......


End file.
